The Young People Staring Down an Endless Brexit

The mismatch between the older generations that voted for Britain’s departure and the younger generations that will have to bear the consequences is unsettling.Photograph by Alexander Coggin / NYT / Redux

On Wednesday morning, I met Lara Spirit, an anti-Brexit campaigner, on College Green, a patch of lawn and shrubs opposite the Palace of Westminster that is transformed into a crowded media village during moments of high political drama in the United Kingdom. The previous evening, Theresa May’s Brexit deal had received its second, comprehensive defeat in the House of Commons, and the place was in full swing. Four TV news channels were broadcasting analysis of the vote from temporary studios while guests and Members of Parliament were ushered in and out of a dozen white radio tents. The weather was gusty, with spots of rain. Spirit, who is twenty-two, is the co-founder of Our Future, Our Choice, a group of young activists who want a second referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union, a goal known as the People’s Vote. Spirit had been up since 4:30 A.M., giving interviews to various outlets. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

Over green tea in a café a few streets away, Spirit allowed herself a few seconds to enjoy the latest blow to May’s plan, which would entail leaving the E.U. in sixteen days. “I think it is a positive moment,” she said. “It’s definitely a positive moment.” But opposing Brexit is a marathon, not a sprint, and Spirit was careful not to get carried away. “So many people in our office are exhausted by it,” she said. “I have lost count of the amount of times I’ve written in a Crowdfunder, like, ‘It’s crunch time.’ ”

Still, she sensed that something was turning. In January, when May’s withdrawal agreement with the E.U. was first rejected, anti-Brexit campaigners celebrated alongside hard-line Brexiteers. That is because May’s deal is neither one thing nor the other: it’s insufficiently bold for those who long to be free from Brussels, yet, for those who wish for things to stay as they are, it’s a noticeable downgrade of Britain’s membership in the bloc. In the run-up to her defeat on Tuesday, however, May suggested that, if her deal could still not be approved by Parliament, the only realistic option would be for Britain’s departure to be postponed or cancelled altogether. “There is a sense now that the dream of the Brexiteers is slipping away,” Spirit told me. On Wednesday evening, M.P.s voted by a comfortable majority to reject leaving the E.U. without a deal on March 29th, making some form of delay in the negotiations almost inevitable. Spirit saw months of protest and parliamentary machinations ahead. “I don’t think we’ll have any idea of whether we will have any form of Brexit or a general election or a People’s Vote until the summer,” she said.

Spirit founded OFOC, which is pronounced “Oh, Fuck” (“It is phonetically very unfortunate,” she said), with a group of fellow-students in late 2017. She was in her final year at the University of Cambridge, studying politics, when she was struck by the absence in the Brexit debate of an organized group representing young people. “It is surely an appealing line of debate to say that young people should have a voice in this process and should be listened to,” she said. “It got very intense very quickly.” Spirit, who is from Chichester, in West Sussex, put her degree on hold and has not returned to school.

For a number of reasons, Brexit has been an invidious political process. But one of the most unsettling has been the mismatch between the generations that voted for Britain’s departure and the generations that will have to bear the consequences. Around seventy per cent of those under the age of twenty-four voted Remain, while sixty per cent of those older than sixty-five voted Leave. “It’s really, really scary to watch politicians who are trying to implement something which the vast majority of us don’t want and have never wanted,” Spirit said. On January 19th, four days after the first defeat of May’s Brexit deal, OFOC celebrated what it called Cross-Over Day, on which the number of new voters entering the electoral register since the referendum should, in theory, have outnumbered the older, pro-Brexit voters who have died in the same period. “It’s quite morbid, but it does raise an interesting discussion about, like, who matters in a democracy,” Spirit told me. “It’s going to be all of the talent, energy, ingenuity of my generation who are going to be having to make sense of Brexit, which they don’t think has ever made any sense for our country.”

OFOC claims an audience of two hundred thousand young people on its mailing lists and social-media platforms. During the past year, the group has sent a blue Battle Bus across the country to sign up supporters at colleges and sports clubs, and has invited M.P.s to visit schools in their constituencies to explain Brexit, where they are frequently asked awkward questions. “There is always a sense of incredulity that we know what we are talking about,” Spirit said. “We know more than they think we know.” In recent months, OFOC has taken to inviting hundreds of young people to come to Parliament on specific days to petition their local M.P.s. “We’ve done them on days which have turned out to be quite crucial voting days, so it has been absolutely packed,” Spirit said. Last week, she went to Brussels to meet Michel Barnier, the E.U.’s chief Brexit negotiator, with a group of students from Northern Ireland. “He is this towering, solid man,” Spirit said. “You wouldn’t want to negotiate with him.” Barnier took the students into his office and showed them a book about the Welsh countryside. Spirit said that he congratulated them for getting involved. “If you don’t deal with politics,” she recalls him saying, “it deals with you.”

The ultimate hope of OFOC, and a minority of M.P.s from both of the main parties, is to force a second Brexit referendum, as the only way of breaking the deadlock in Westminster. The idea would be for voters to choose between May’s withdrawal agreement, or something close to it, and staying in the E.U. “It seems to be the best form of providing some closure, or at least some movement,” Spirit said. “In all the votes at the moment, you don’t feel like you are getting any closer to a solution.” Officially, at least, the Labour Party, led by Jeremy Corbyn, is committed to pursuing a second referendum when all other options, including its own Brexit policy and having a general election, have been attempted first. But Corbyn’s enthusiasm for a People’s Vote has flickered and waned, when it has been discernible at all. On Tuesday night, after May’s defeat, he failed to mention it. I asked Spirit whether she believed a second referendum could put the matter to rest now, given the turmoil of the past three years, and her answer surprised me in its frankness and pessimism. “I have now come to terms with the fact that I am going to be talking about and thinking about Europe for the rest of my life,” Spirit replied.